Book & Media reviews for the spiritual quest.

Spiritual Rebirth

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” ~ John 3:5 (NRSV)

While we possess all four Elements in equal measure, we are most certainly born through and into Earth primarily. This leaves us in an unbalanced state, not evil but tending toward sinfulness (that is, tending to drift further into a purely material mentality).* It is only in being baptized in Water, Air and Fire and reborn through them that we can begin to perfect ourselves. This is an alchemical process, not simply a matter of immersion in the physical analogy of the Element in question.

*Sin will be the subject of tomorrow’s Your Daily Hermes, and I’ll soon cover it in much greater depth over at The Magical Messiah.

Books, books, books.

"Books, books, books. I read, I find, I lose, I find again, again I lose. At last a certain whole becomes formed in my mind. I see the unbroken line of thought and knowledge which passes from century to century, from age to age, from country to country, from one race to another; a line deeply hidden beneath layers of religions and philosophies which are, in fact, only distortions and perversions of the ideas belonging to the line. I see an extensive literature full of significance which was quite unknown to me until recently, but which, as now becomes quite clear to me, feeds the philosophy we know, although it is scarcely mentioned in the text-books on the history of philosophy. And I am amazed now that I did not know it before, that there are so few who have even heard about it. Who knows, for instance, that an ordinary pack of playing-cards contains a profound and harmonious philosophical system? This is so entirely forgotten that it seems almost new." ~ P.D. Ouspensky, "A New Model of the Universe" (2nd ed., 1934)